Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.
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He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story -- the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.
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By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.
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If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.
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Walking along the crowded row He met the one he used to know.
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At first it was simply liking, Nastenka, but now, now ! I am just in the same position as you were when you went to him with your bundle. In a worse position than you, Nastenka,because he cared for no one else as you do.
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At such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where the sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.
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... you can never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and mistress.
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..., twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.
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To study the meaning of man and of life - I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.
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Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.
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Man is stupid, phenomenally stupid.
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My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?
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Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything.
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I've long stopped worrying about who invented whom - God man or man God.
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I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.
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It sometimes happened that you might be familiar with a man for several years thinking he was a wild animal, and you would regard him with contempt. And then suddenly a moment would arrive when some uncontrollable impulse would lay his soul bare, and you would behold in it such riches, such sensitivity and warmth, such a vivid awareness of its own suffering and the suffering of others, that the scales would fall from your eyes and at first you would hardly be able to believe what you had seen and heard. The reverse also happens.
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To think too much is a disease.
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Humiliate the reason and distort the soul...
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.. But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way, in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness.
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I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?
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It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.
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Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.
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But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.